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Table of content
Introduction
Methodology: How We Did and What We Did
Sources of E-Commerce Website Traffic
Organic Traffic Distribution Desktop vs Mobile Countries Distribution of Organic Search Traffic
SERP Features for E-commerce
E-Commerce Advertising Trends Paid Advertising Spend Type of Display Ads Size of Display Ads Devices Targeted Product Listing Ads
Emotional triggers in Ads Phrases in Ads Most popular discounts in Ads Guarantee Ads Call to action that creates a sense of urgency
Backlinks in numbers Top Anchors Type of backlinks Follow vs. Nofollow
Technical issues HTTP / HTTPS Hreflangs
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Introduction
The end of 2017 provides an opportunity to identify strong and weak points of your current activities as well as determine necessary changes in the strategy of your online store. The increasingly competitive world of e-com-merce challenges companies and makes them adjust their marketing strat-egy to an ever changing market. So how does your online business com-pare with other businesses in your industry?
To help you assess where you stand and make informed decisions about your marketing strategy and budget, we gathered and analyzed data from a wide spectrum of major e-commerce industries to show the sources and types of their website traffic, how they leverage advertising, the usage of the emotions in their ads and the makeup of their backlink profiles.
Moreover, we looked into the e-commerce websites’ use of secure (HTTPS) versus traditional (HTTP) domain URLs and hreflang attribute (for surfacing search results and website pages in the correct language or regional URL).
We hope you find the insights gleaned from our research helpful in for-mulating a smart, cost-effective strategy for your e-commerce site going forward, be it a small business or international enterprise.
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Methodology: How We Did What We Did
We started off with a big set of data consisting of more than 8,000 of the most visited e-commerce websites from different countries (US, UK, Spain, Italy, Germany and France to name but a few). In order to avoid calculation errors, we didn’t collect data for countries where Google is a secondary search engine (China, Korea, etc).
Sports & Recreation
Children
Food / Nearfood
Electronics
Health
Home & Garden
Clothing
Books
Furniture
Flowers
Jewelry
Music
Travel
The e-commerce sites in our research represent 13 different industry categories:
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Traffic Sources breakdown, Organic traffic distribution, Advertising trends, Backlinks in numbers: data for those parts is collected from more than 8000 websites worldwide over the period of January 1 to November 31 2017.
Emotional Triggers: The data for this part is representing the frequency of usage of phrases in Ads, basing in 4M of Ads from different categories.
SERP features: SERP features change daily and correlate heavily with overall Google SERP volatility, hence we decided to only show the data for the October 2017. Data for this part is based on the percentage of SERPs where this feature appears in top 20 results.
Technical issues: Here the readers will find information based on sites’ technical condition in November's.
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For the e-commerce sites researched as a whole, our data analysis revealed:
Then, using the SEMrush data, we culled the following information for each category:
With that, let’s take a deep dive into the research findings...
The distribution of organic site traffic between mobile and desktop, as well as by country
The search engine results page (SERP features for site rankings)***
The most popular phrases, guarantee and call-to-action (CTA) language used in ads
The top backlinks anchor words and phrases
HTTPS vs. HTTP version of the websites and prevalence of the hreflang attribute****
The sources of website traffic and their relative significance
The amount invested in advertising
The type and size of display ads, devices targeted, and use of Google Product Listing Ads (PLAs)
The relative types of backlinks*
The emotional triggers used in ads**
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Sources of E-Commerce Website Traffic
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Sources of E-Commerce Website Traffic
Of the five sources of e-commerce website traffic – direct, referral, search, social, and Google Ads (that is presented as paid) – direct traffic claims the lion’s share among eight of the 13 categories researched, followed by search.
42.18%DIRECT
40.1%SEARCH
2.92%SOCIAL
6.19%PAID
8.61%REFERRAL
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• • •Search is the primary source of site traffic for five of the categories, fol-lowed by direct. Combined, direct and search traffic account for over 80% of all e-commerce website traf-fic among all the industry verticals studied.
Referral via links from other websites is the third most significant channel of total website traffic, with the exception of sports & recreation and flowers. Google paid advertising claims the third spot for these two categories.
Social media drives the least amount of traffic to e-commerce sites for all 13 categories.
SPORTS & RECREATION
42.05%
41.87%7.07%
5.94%
3.08%
CHILDREN
45.09%
39.03%
8.26%
3.01%
4.61%
FOOD & NEARFOOD
43.02%
39.74%3.37%
11.92%
1.95%
ELECTRONICS
39.35%
41.28%
3.06%
6.26%
10.04%
HEALTH
46.88%
35.51%
3.55%
6.67%
7.38%
HOME & GARDEN
36.74%
43.81%
2.04%
7.97%
9.43%
FASHION
48.64%
31.96%
4.94%
6.38%
8.07%
BOOKS
39.40%
45.54%
1.35%
2.54%
11.17%
FURNITURE
38.06%
44.14%
3.44%
5.74%
8.61%
FLOWERS
48.06%
32.77%
0.87%
10.58%
7.72%
JEWELRY
41.66%
40.05%
4.85%
6.10%
7.34%
MUSIC
36.72%
47.45%
4.17%
5.85%
5.81%
TRAVEL
42.68%
38.14%
1.61%
7.40%
10.17%
PAID
DIRECT
SOCIAL
REFERRAL
SEARCH
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What it means to you as a marketer
The relative dominance of direct traffic can be attributed to good brand aware-ness and brand loyalty. However, in and of itself, brand familiarity and repeat busi-ness is not a scalable strategy for long-term growth.
With search playing such a significant role in driving e-commerce traffic, it is well worth your while to invest in both pay-per-click (PPC) and organic search engine optimization (SEO) informed by a smart keyword strategy and competitive intelli-gence.
Both well-targeted paid ads and solid or-ganic search practices are scalable strat-
How SEMrush helps
Brand MonitoringTraffic Analyticsshows the sources of your own and your compet-itors’ website traffic. You can view direct, search, referral, paid and social traffic as a whole, or sep-arated by channel.Our estimates are based on clickstream data orig-inating from multiple proprietary and third-party data sources.
allows you to monitor your brand’s reputation, as well as your online rivals’, by tracking mentions and customer reviews across the digital space.Filter results by source and date, discover new word-of-mouth opportunities for brand promo-tion, and create marketing buzz around your product or service.
Analyze the traffic of your competitors Monitor your brand
egies that complement each other by raising brand awareness, keeping your company front and center as shopper’s search for your product or service.
It is also recommended to build out your scalable organic strategy by expanding re-ferral traffic. Cultivating a strong backlink profile of high authority domains serves to improve site ranking on the search engine results pages (SERPs) as well.
Finally, while social brings the least amount of traffic to the e-commerce categories we researched, it isn’t without value in spread-ing word of mouth about your brand…and like organic traffic, it’s free!
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merges Google Analytics and Google Search Con-sole data to reveal the 99% of ‘not provided’ key-words. Discover not only which keywords are driv-ing search traffic to each page of your website, but which of them are resulting in conversions.Gain insights into key customer behavior metrics such as the number of sessions, their duration and bounce rate.
Social Media Tracker
PPC Keyword Tool
Keyword Magic Tool
Organic Traffic Insights
gives you millions keyword ideas for building a profitable SEO or PPC campaign.Discover long-tail keyword opportunities for rich content and higher search rankings and select the best keywords for your campaign. Estimate how much traffic they’ll bring by determining their click potential with real-time metrics of search volume, keyword difficulty, competitive density and CPC data.
reveals both your own and your competitors’ best-performing posts with the highest engage-ment rates across multiple social media plat-forms, giving you detailed information about likes/dislikes, views, shares and comments to inform your social media strategy.Track mentions and the hottest trending topics in your industry, and easily build reports on your so-cial media campaigns to showcase your results.
allows you to easily collect keywords through multiple channels, manage and optimize your keyword lists, efficiently eliminate duplicate and competing keywords, and perfect your PPC cam-paign with a polished keyword list.
Organic ResearchBacklinkshelps you conduct a deep link analysis of all re-ferring domains’ authority, gain competitive link intelligence on your rivals’ backlinks, spot new re-ferral traffic sources, and improve your link build-ing strategy with the insights gained.View the types and geolocaton of all your site’s incoming links, see anchor texts, and discov-er both the referring site’s and your site’s target webpages.
offers insights for powerful competitive intelli-gence.See your online competitors’ best performing keywords and organic content strategies both in desktop and mobile search. Evaluate the value of keywords against the key web performance in-dicators, discover new organic competition, and track changes in your domain’s position in the SERPs relative to your rivals.
Uncover your not provided keywords
Check your backlinks Get competitive intel
Create your profitable campaign Develop your social media strategy
Optimize your PPC campaign
Organic Traffic Distribution
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Surprisingly, for all 13 e-commerce categories combined, we found desk-top leads mobile in organic search traffic by approximately 14 percent, claiming 56.98% of total e-commerce traffic.
Desktop accounts for more organic traffic to each of the 13 industry verticals, as well.
There are two reasons for our seemingly counterintuitive findings. First, mobile apps were not included in our research, so the organic search traffic from mobile app browsing are excluded. Secondly, because the sites researched are strictly e-commerce, consumers’ tendency to gath-er detailed information about a product or service on their desktop com-puter – as well as convert – after doing preliminary research on their mobile device translates into more desktop organic traffic overall.
Organic Traffic Distribution Desktop vs. Mobile
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Desktop’s lead is most pronounced in the health category (60.65% to mobile’s 39.35%), followed by furniture (59.59% vs. 40.41%), food/nearfood (58.75% vs. 41.25%) and children (58.34% vs. 41.66%).
Mobile organic search traffic is strongest in the electronics category (55.22%). Jew-elry (44.7%), travel (44.11%) and flowers (42.85%) also have a healthy amount of mobile traffic.
SPORT &RECREATION
FOOD &NEARFOOD HEALTH CLOTHING FURNITURE JEWELRY TRAVEL
MUSICFLOWERSBOOKSHOME &GARDEN
ELECTRONICSCHILDREN
42.56% 41.66% 41.25% 44.78% 39.35% 44.12% 42.73% 42.43% 40.41% 42.85% 44.70% 42.04% 44.11%
57.44% 58.34% 58.75% 55.22% 60.65% 55.88% 57.27% 57.57% 59.59% 57.15% 55.30% 57.96% 55.89%
DESKTOP56.98%
MOBILE43.02%
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What it means to you as a marketer
Although desktop organic traffic does dominate mobile, it is by a signif-icant margin for only a handful of the e-commerce verticals included in our study – most notably health.
The gap is closing rapidly between desktop and mobile search, and mo-bile traffic is expected to overtake desktop in the not-too-distant future.
In fact, mobile search is growing so rapidly that Google has begun to im-plement its “mobile-first” indexing of websites.The implementation pro-cess will be slow, so time is on your side. However, eventually all websites will be indexed in Google search according to its “mobile-first” update.
If you’d like more information on how to prepare for the mobile-first shift, you’re invited to consult our article on the subject or watch our virtual webinar, The Complete Guide to Mobile Search.
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The US leads the international pack as the country of origin for organic search traffic, accounting for 42.9% of traffic for all 13 categories com-bined. It also is the primary country driving traffic to each industry verti-cal in our study.
Other countries combined, outside of the individual countries listed, ac-count for 20.34% of organic search traffic to all the e-commerce catego-ries in the research.
Countries Distribution of Organic Search Traffic
OTHERS
DEUKUS
IT
RU
ES
CA
BR
IN
FR
20.3%
42.9% 6.7% 6.2%
4.5%
3.8%
3.6%
3.3%
3.1%
2.9%
2.6%
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SPORT &RECREATION
US
UKBR
MUSIC
US
DEUK
HEALTH
US
DEUK
FURNITURE
US
DEUK
FOOD &NEARFOOD
US
UKDE
FLOWERS
US
UKFR
ELECTRONICS
US
DEFR
CLOTHING
US
UKDE
CHILDREN
US
RUUA
BOOKS
US
RUCA
JEWELRY
UKDE
US
TRAVEL
US
UKIN
HOME &GARDEN
US
UKFR
The U.K is a far distant second to the US as a source of organic search traffic, and Germany third, both for all categories as a whole and separately. The UK is second to the US for seven of the verticals, Germany for four, and Russia for two.
The UK is a significant source of traffic to travel, sports & recreation, jewelry, home & garden, food/nearfood, flowers, and clothing categories. German searchers are most interested in music, health, furniture and electronics, while those from Rus-sia search more for children and books.
When the third largest origins of organic search traffic are con-sidered, the countries are more diverse. India, Brazil, France, Canada and Ukraine are represented in this grouping.
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What it means to you as a marketer
While most of the organic search traffic to the e-commerce industries studied come from English-speaking countries, it’s important to ensure the best user experience for any visitor from any country.
The way to do this is to implement “hreflang” attribute to display your site’s web pages in the correct language. Google also recommends us-ing hreflang for content with small regional variations, such as those be-tween the US and Great Britain.
If, like most business owners, coding is not your area of expertise, then it’s highly recommended you consult someone fluent in international SEO.
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Site Auditensures your web pages are literally up to speed so you can take advantage of the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) format that dominates mo-bile search results globally.Allow us to check the page load time and overall health of your site. The International SEO catches hreflang attribute implementation issues in its international SEO report. Ensure you consistently deliver the best user experience with up-to-date International SEO reports to discover hreflang issues.
Audit your website and improve your UX
Discover mobile vs. desktop strategies
Create smart multi-device campaigns
Position Trackingallows you to track your website’s organic search ranking on mobile and desktop, create multilin-gual campaigns for any locale worldwide, and spot local competitors that are ranking in Goog-le’s top 100 results for the same keywords that you’re targeting.Inform your multi-device marketing campaigns with insights into your website’s keyword rank-ings and site positions in desktop, tablet and smartphone.
Organic Researchgives you insights into your competitors’ mobile and desktop organic search strategies.Uncover what keywords your online rivals are targeting for both their mobile and desktop plat-forms, and leverage that competitive intelligence to inform your own organic search strategies for mobile and desktop campaigns.
How SEMrush helps
SERP Features for E-Commerce
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SERP Features for E-Commerce
As part of our research, we looked into what e-commerce site features show up in the highly competitive top 20 listings in-cluded in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Along with the SERP features, we checked the availability of ads on SERPs.
Due to the daily fluctuation in SERP fea-tures, which heavily correlates with the overall volatility of Google’s SERPs, we based our analysis on data gathered from October 2017.
Our study revealed that “reviews” are the most prominent of the 15 SERP features
INSTANT ANSWERCAROUSEL
LOCAL PACKNEWS
IMAGESSITE LINKS
REVIEWTWEETVIDEO
FEATURED VIDEOFEATURED SNIPPETKNOWLEDGE PANEL
TOP ADSBOTTOM ADS
NO SERP FEATURES
GLOBAL
PERCENTAGE OF SERPS WHERE THIS FEATURE APPEARS IN TOP 20 RESULTS
1.97%
0.44%
6.88%
8.32%
21.51%
41.68%
57.93%
2.11%
25.51%
0.29%
2.8%
27.18%
14.65%
48.69%
9.57%
analyzed, both globally and for the US. The reviews feature is displayed in the top 20 results in 57.93% of the global SERPs, and in 62.03% of the US SERPs.
This parallel trend between global and US top 20 SERP features holds for more than half of the 15 studied, with the following six exceptions: news (8.32% globally com-pared to 2.61% for the US), images (41.68% to 51.09%), site links (21.51% to 10.88%), video (25.51% to 33.36%), knowledge pan-el (27.18% to 13.17%), and top ads (14.65% to 8.85%).
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••
•
•
•
After reviews, bottom ads appear in 48.69% of e-commerces globally and 47.45% in the US.
Images surpass video by a substantial margin, both internationally and in the US. Worldwide, images claim 41.68% of the top 20 SERP listings, and even more so in the US with 51.09%.
Featured video shows up in the smallest percent-age of the top 20 search results globally. Instant answer shows up least in the US SERPs.
While Google’s “Knowl-edge Panel” proves to be a popular SERP feature glob-ally, displayed in 27.18% of the top 20 search listings, the panel appears in only 13.17% of the US SERPs’ first 20 results.
The carousel feature is also scant internationally and in the US, with only 0.44% and 0.3% of the SERPs display-ing it in the top 20 listings, respectively.
INSTANT ANSWERCAROUSELLOCAL PACKNEWSIMAGESSITE LINKSREVIEWTWEETVIDEOFEATURED VIDEOFEATURED SNIPPETKNOWLEDGE PANELTOP ADSBOTTOM ADSNO SERPFEATURES
US
PERCENTAGE OF SERPS WHERE THIS FEATURE APPEARS IN TOP 20 RESULTS
7.03%
0.30%
0.27%
2.61%
10.88%
2.04%
33.36%
0.34%
3.12%
13.17%
8.85%
62.03%
51.09%
47.45%
11.21%
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What it means to you as marketer
For e-commerce marketers focused on the US, the data indicates incor-porating reviews, images, bottom ads and videos in your web pages may help boost search rankings.
If you have a global or mixed base of target customers that include both US and international prospects, again, including images and reviews in your site pages may improve their search visibility.
Of the more notable disparities between global and US top 20 SERP fea-tures is video content. In the U.S, 33.36% of the top 20 listings have video as an attribute, compared to 25.51% worldwide. This would imply that adding video to site pages geared to the US market could give you a competitive edge.
Also, our research shows Google’s Knowledge Panel results are far more prominent in the top 20 listings worldwide than in the US, capturing over twice of the SERP real estate with 27.18% to the US share of 13.17 percent.
Google’s Knowledge Panel showcases individual e-commerce sites with a prominent “box” detailing critical information such as your business name, address and phone number (“NAP”). Clearly, for those that hope to capture local business, investing some time into simple coding with se-mantic Schema markup is a relatively cost-effective strategy for search visibility, especially for specific regional locales of international markets.
Yet another significant point of departure between US and global top 20 SERP features are site links. They claim significantly more of the top 20 SERP features internationally, and especially so with site links with 21.51% globally to 10.88% for the US.
While it’s not possible to draw absolute conclusions from our data, it’s worthwhile to note that the media slated for your e-commerce site pag-es (or absence thereof) should be carefully reviewed by your creative and marketing teams, depending upon your target markets.
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How SEMrush helps
Position Tracking
Keyword Gap
Content Analyzer
On Page SEO Checker
gives you competitive insights into your site’s web pages’ search position for international, do-mestic, regional and local markets.Track what strategies are working with multitar-get campaigns for any region or locale you’re tar-geting.
lets you see what’s working for your rivals relative to you with our side-by-side domain comparison.Visualize data to efficiently inform your digital marketing team and your budget decisions to keep a step ahead.
allows you to assess your website’s content to see what is working in terms of your overall strat-egy as well as what isn’t performing.Gain insights into key customer behavior metrics such as the number of sessions, their duration and bounce rate.
gives you recommendation for reviews schema markups based on top 10 rivals analysis. Utilizing SEO tactics from your competitors and analytical research data from SEMrush,On Page SEO Checker automatically offers prac-tical suggestions.
Track your site’s position View your content performance
Get your recommendation See your competitive ranking
E-Commerce Advertising Trends
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E-Commerce Advertising Trends
On the paid side of e-commerce, we gathered and analyzed data on the amount spent on Adwords, both as a whole and among the 13 e-com-merce categories included in our research.
We also delved into how the industry is leveraging display ads, including the type and size of ads, the devices targeted, in addition to their use of keywords in Google Product Listing Ads (PLAs).
The data collected represent more than 8,000 websites over an 11-month period, from January 1st through November 31st of 2017.
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50%$0–1,000 15%$1,000–5,000
7%$5,000–10,000
16%$10,000–50,00012%$50,000+
ALL CATEGORIES
Paid Advertising Spend
All told, a full 50% of the industries researched spend $1,000 or less on paid advertising.
The second highest range of total ad expenditures falls within $10,000 to $50,000, with a remote 16 percent. This ad spend is closely followed by the $1,000 to $5,000 range for all e-commerce stores, claiming 15% of the total.
The fourth highest total ad expenditure is $50,000+ with 12%, while the $5,000 to $10,000 range is least represented at 7 percent.
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The top three industries proving most frugal with their ad budgets are music, books and flow-ers. The music vertical leads with 84% of its total e-commerce ad spend in the $1,000 or less range, followed by books (75%) and flowers (72%).
Of all the categories, cloth-ing invests most heavily in paid ads by a substantial margin. Online clothing stores spend 37% on ads within the $50,000+ range.
The clothing industry also claims the highest ad spend within the $10,000 to $50,000 bracket, ac-counting for 44% of its total ad investment.
At a distant second to the clothing industry for the highest ad spend is the home & garden vertical. Its expenditure within the $50,000+ range accounts for 20% of its total invest-ment in paid ads.
Industries with the largest disparity between the least ad spend ($1,000 or less) and the highest amount ($50,000+) are food/near-food (61% total spend of $1,000 or less compared to 6% of $50,000 +), health (40% to 9%), jewelry (36% to 10%), and most notably, music (84% to 0 percent).
SPORTS & RECREATION
6%
23%
16% 20%
34%
CHILDREN FOOD & NEARFOOD
HEALTH HOME & GARDEN CLOTHING
FLOWERS JEWELRY
1000 - 5000$ 50000+$
5000 - 10000$
10000 - 50000$0 - 1000$
7%
18%
9%
11%
55%
8%
16%
6%
9%
61%
ELECTRONICS
11%
12%
15%
15%
47%
14%
11%
9% 26%
40%
6%
9%
44%
4%
37%
9%
19%
20% 27%
25%
BOOKS
4%
12%
5%
4%
75%
9%
18%
9%
13%
51%
2%
13%
8%
5%
72%
MUSIC
4%
12%
5%
4%
75%
13%
21%
10% 19%
36%
TRAVEL
3%
13%
6%
13%
65%
FURNITURE
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Type of Display Ads
As a whole, the e-commerce industry overwhelmingly favors mobile-friendly HTML display ads over traditional media, which generally includes static or animat-ed images.
The data shows the HTML format repre-sents nearly 70% of all e-commerce dis-play ads, well over double the approximate 30% of standard media ad types.
SPORT &RECREATION
FOOD &NEARFOOD HEALTH CLOTHING FURNITURE JEWELRY TRAVEL
MUSICFLOWERSBOOKSHOME &GARDEN
ELECTRONICSCHILDREN
42.56% 41.66% 41.25% 44.78% 39.35% 44.12% 42.73% 42.43% 40.41% 42.85% 44.70% 42.04% 44.11%
52.28% 74.08% 26.37% 56.12% 78.77% 63.25% 12.02% 68.41% 29.50% 65.36% 23.38% 68.97% 54.36%
47.72% 25.92% 73.63% 43.88% 21.23% 36.75% 87.98% 31.59% 70.50% 34.64% 76.62% 31.03% 46.64%
MEDIA30.32%
HTML69.68%
The industry categories leading in their adoption of HTML for their online display advertising include health (78.77% HTML vs. 21.23% standard media ads), children (74.08% vs. 25.92%), and music (68.97% vs. 31.03%).
On the other side of the spectrum, the top e-commerce sectors favoring traditional media ads over HTML are clothing (89.98% media ads vs. 12.02% HTML), jewelry (76.62% vs. 23.38%), and food/nearfood (73.63% vs.26.37%).
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Size of Display Ads
Altogether, the e-commerce industry heavily favors the leaderboard (728x90) ad size, which accounts for 44.84% of all display ads.
The second most popular format is 300x250, accounting for 20.95% of ads. The 300x250 format is one of the two top performing ad sizes iden-tified by Google, rendering well on high-end mobile devices as well as on desktop. Lastly, ads sized 160x600 accounts for 15.12 percent of all display ads.
The e-commerce industry preferences discovered parallel the findings of our 2017 Display Advertising report.
44.84% 20.95% 15.12%
300x250
728x90
160x600
ALL CATEGORIES
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65.05%20.64% 7.08%
SPORTS & RECREATION FOOD & NEARFOOD
ELECTRONICS HOME & GARDEN
CLOTHING FURNITURE
CHILDREN
54.14% 15.95% 13.07% 65.25% 8.19% 9.88%
65.98% 14.04% 4.98% 34.43% 22.79% 18.37%
HEALTH
30.29% 23% 13.70%
36.81% 24.78% 20.39% 64.43% 11.48% 12.53%
BOOKS
64.14% 6.84% 19.29%
336x280
FLOWERS
41.43% 23.76% 15.70%
JEWELRY
22.13% 61.13% 8.86%
336x280
MUSIC
32.31% 22.54% 12.59%
TRAVEL
49.28% 16.22% 9.77%
160x600 300x250 728x90 336x280
The leaderboard is the predominant ad format for 11 of the 13 e-commerce sectors researched. The two exceptions are sports & recreation, which predominantly employs the160x600 format (65.05%) and jewelry, which invests most in the 300x250 ad size.
The flowers and jewelry categories are out-liers in their use of the 336x280 display ad format, which represents the second of the two identified by Google as a top-perform-ing ad size. The flowers vertical employs the format for 15.7% of its ads, and jewelry for 8.86 percent.
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Devices Targeted
Collectively, the e-commerce categories show a strong preference for mobile devices over desktop in targeting their display ads, with only 14.81% geared towards desktop. Of the 85.39% slated for mobile devic-es, slightly more is for smartphones (44.17%) than tablets (41.17%).
27.64%
ANDROIDSMARTHPHONE
14.61%
DESKTOP22.20%
IOS TABLET
18.97%
ANDROIDTABLET
16.58%
IOSSMARTHPHONE
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SPORTS & RECREATION CHILDREN FOOD & NEARFOOD
ELECTRONICS HEALTH HOME & GARDEN
FASHION BOOKS FURNITURE
ANDROID TABLET
ANDROID SMARTHPHONE
DESKTOP IOS SMARTHPHONE
IOS TABLET
29.89%
6.18%
21.43% 18.69%
23.81%
14.50%
26.69%
17.20% 24.35%
17.26%
26.15%
15.67%
25.01% 10.02%
23.15%
24.62%
25.50%
15.79% 10.73%
23.36%
17.52%
12.55%
19.05% 16.88%
33.99%
24.56%
19.15%
21.47% 19.64%
15.17%
19.73%
12.48%
25.83% 8.51%
33.45%
33.52%
10.18%
16.91% 17.33%
22.06%
29.22%
12.08%
21.49% 7.78%
29.44%
FLOWERS
22.07%
13%
29.09% 18.36%
24.48%
JEWELRY
31.76%
13.66%
17.07% 14.91%
22.6%
MUSIC
19.56%
13.09%
23.61% 13.54%
30.21%
TRAVEL
23.89%
13.27%
25.66% 15.93%
21.23%
Only two of the 13 cate-gories target a majority of their display ads towards desktop, children (26.69%) and electronics (25.5%).
The top three online stores most invested in tablet display ads are furniture (72.42%), clothing (59.28%) and music (53.82%).
The three verticals most invested in mobile ads, in-cluding both smartphones and tablets, are sports & recreation (93.82%), books (89.82%) and clothing (87.52%).
Between the iOS and An-droid tablets, the verticals demonstrate a preference for the iOS over Android (22.2% to 18.87%) as a whole. The opposite holds true for smartphones, with them leaning more towards Android than the iOS (27.64% to 16.58%) altogether.
The three categories leading in their leverage of smartphone ads are books, by a wide margin with 84.37%, sports & rec-reation at a distant second with 48.58%, and jewelry, with 46.35 percent.
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Product Listing Ads
A significant investment for e-commerces can be the paid advertising is Google Product Listing Ads (PLAs).
Included in our research is how the 13 categories of online retailers are using their respective adwords campaigns.
NUMBER OF KEYWORDS
NUMBER OF ADS
MUSICFLOWERSBOOKS HOME &GARDEN ELECTRONICSCHILDREN SPORT &
RECREATIONFOOD &
NEARFOOD HEALTHCLOTHING FURNITURE JEWELRY
Electronics most heavily leverages both number of PLA ads and number of key-words, representing 26.58% of all ads and 36.15% of keywords for its vertical.
Clothing follows the electronics vertical with its total percentage of PLAs (20.89%), but lags behind home & garden with its keywords (16.01%).
The home & garden sector is a remote sec-ond to electronics in number of keywords (18.46%) relative to its total percentage of ads (19.83%).
Sports & recreation is a distant fourth in its leverage of PLAs among online retailers (13.5%), but boasts a hefty 11.63% in its number of keywords.
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What it means to you as marketer
According to our study, 6,19% of all traffic accounts for paid traffic, and even though its share isn’t large, it goes without saying that such traffic is important for e-com-merce industry.
When you work in digital marketing, you need to know what amount of money to invest in paid promotion (depending on the industry that you target). Besides, if you use paid ads, you need to know what type of ads work better for e-commerce industry. Same with the PLA items that at-tract a lot of customers’ attention and al-
How SEMrush helps
Advertising research PLA researchA tool that helps to identify the amount of ads used by the competitors in your niche, the esti-mated budgets they invest in advertising and keywords they are using for it, along with the his-torical data and changes they applied during the campaigns. Learn how much traffic they get from their ads and create the best strategy for your own website.
A tool that allows you to analyze the performance of an advertiser’s Google Shopping ad cam-paigns. Reports generated by this tool are a pow-erful source of data for ecommerce websites as well as for agencies that want to take advantage of competitive intelligence tools!
Monitor your competitors’ Ads Take advantage of the PLAs
low to buy a product in a couple of clicks. Having at your disposal all this information will definitely make your life as a marketer easier and help you be more effective in promoting your products.
Mobile traffic has been on the rise lately and of course it needs to be taken into account when launching your paid pro-motion. Apart from that, monitoring your competitors will give you the advantage when you design your marketing strategy and make estimations on how much mon-ey to spend on it.
Display Advertisinggather competitive intelligence on your top com-petitors to inform your own media plan. Pull a report of all the publishers where a competitor’s display ads were found to get a deeper analysis of your competitor’s target audience.
Create winning advertising strategy
Emotional triggers in Ads
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Emotional triggers in Ads
It is very important to appeal to emotions in e-commerce ads in order to get more customers and pique their curiosity. That’s why SEMrush decided to analyze what phrases the biggest e-commerce websites use in their ads to attract customers.
We collected and analyzed data on the most popular phrases in ads along with the discounts the leaders of e-commerce industry use among the 13 e-commerce categories included in our research.
We also delved into how the e-commerce businesses guarantee certain services in their ads, and what “sense of urgency ads” they use to attract the customer right here and right now.
Apart from the US e-commerce ads, we also took a look at UK ads to see what the difference is between these two primarily English-speaking countries.
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Phrases in Ads
This being said, “free shipping” is the most frequently used phrase in the US for all the industries studied. For the parallel UK e-commerce cate-gories, the most popular phrase employed in the ads is pretty much the same, adjusted for British English: “Free Delivery.”
20 40 60 80 100
FREE SHIPPING
OFFICIAL SITE
SHIPPING ORDER
SHOP NOW
LOW PRICE
HUGE SELECTION
LOWEST PRICE
BUY NOW
TOP BRAND
SHOP TODAY
FREE DELIVERY
ORDER NOW
ONLINE TODAY
SHOP ONLINE
LIMITED TIME
ONLINE NOW
FAST SHIPPING
SHIPPING RETURN
ENJOY FREE
GREAT DEAL
POPULARITY COEFFICIENT
US
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40 60 80 100
POPULARITY COEFFICIENT
20
UK
FREE DELIVERY
UK DELIVERY
SHOP NOW
DELIVERY ORDER
ONLINE TODAY
BUY ONLINE
BUY NOW
ONLINE NOW
FREE SHIPPING
SHOP ONLINE
For US e-commerce ads, “Official Site” is the second most popular phrase.“UK Deliv-ery” is the second most leveraged phrase in its e-commerce ads.
“Shipping Order” occupies third place in the US, while British e-commerce resources stick to the “Shop Now” call-to-action (CTA) in their ads.
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The “50% discount” tops the list of the most advertised, and “80% dis-count” the least, by e-commerce businesses.
The data further shows that discounts differ significantly depending on the e-commerce industry. For example, the books category, unlike all the others, offers 90% discounts, which does not occur in any other category.
Most popular discounts in Ads
50%
20%
70%
40%
15%
60%
30%
10%25%
80%
US
50%
20%
70%
40%
15%
60%
30%
10% 25%
75%
UK
50%
20%
70%
40%
15%
60%
30%
10%25%
80%
US
50%
20%
70%
40%
15%
60%
30%
10% 25%
75%
UK
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CLOTHING BOOKS
FURNITURE FLOWERS JEWELRY
SPORTS & RECREATION CHILDREN FOOD & NEARFOOD ELECTRONICS
HEALTH HOME & GARDEN
0 50 100 150 200 250 300
10%15%20%25%30%40%50%60%70%75%
0 50 100 150 200
5%10%20%25%30%40%50%60%70%80%
0 20 40 60 80 100 120
10%15%20%25%30%33%40%50%60%70%
0 20 40 60 80 100
10%15%25%35%40%50%70%75%80%88%
0 30 60 90 120 150
5%10%15%20%25%35%40%50%70%85%
0 50 100 150 200
10%15%20%25%30%40%50%70%71%80%
0 100 200 300 400 500 600
15%20%25%30%40%50%60%70%75%90%
FURNITURE FLOWERS JEWELRY
0 50 100 150 200 250 300
10%15%20%40%50%60%80%90%95%97%
0 50 100 150 200
10%15%20%25%30%40%50%55%60%70%
0 50 100 150 200 250
10%15%20%25%30%33%40%45%50%70%
0 50 100 150 200 250 300
20%25%30%40%50%60%65%70%75%80%
MUSIC
0 5 10 15 20 25
8%10%15%20%25%30%40%50%63%70%
TRAVEL
0 50 100 150 200 250 300
10%15%20%25%30%35%40%45%50%70%
The only category of e-commerce businesses that use the 35% CTA dis-count is health, while the 33% discount is used in food/nearfood and flowers industry ads.
A 70% discount is mostly used by home and garden and health e-commerce industries. A 60% discount is the most popular for the furniture vertical, 45% for flowers, 40% for electron-ics, and 20% for sports & recreation.
The only category of e-commerce businesses that use the 35% CTA dis-count is health, while the 33% discount is used in food/nearfood and flowers industry ads.
The most popular discount in the US and UK is 50%, while least popular for the US is 80%, and 75% for UK.
The US e-commerce industries use the 70% discount more often, while the UK online retailers demonstrate a preference for the 20% discount.
A 50% discount is the most popular among chil-dren, food/nearfood and clothing industries, while 90% discount is the least popular among these cat-egories and appears least frequently in the data set.
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Guarantee Ads
Perhaps one of the benefits most valued by prospective customers is the guarantee provided by e-commerce businesses.
In our study, we analyzed the most popular guarantee-related phras-es that e-commerce businesses use in their ads. The frequency of the phrases used is based on US and UK e-commerce ads, apart from the whole scope of websites encompassed in our research.
FREQUENCY
USLOWEST PRICE GUARANTEED
PRICE GUARANTEE
MONEY BACK GUARANTEE
SATISFACTION GUARANTEE
LOW PRICE GUARANTEE
MATCH GUARANTEE
GUARANTEE FREE SHIPPING
LOWEST PRICES GUARANTEED
DELIVERY GUARANTEED
BEST PRICE GUARANTEE
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FREQUENCY
LOWEST PRICE GUARANTEED
PRICE GUARANTEE
MONEY BACK GUARANTEE
SATISFACTION GUARANTEE
GUARANTEE FREE
5 YEARS GUARANTEE
BEST PRICE GUARANTEE
PRICE MATCH GUARANTEE
PRICES GUARANTEED
UK100% MONEY BACK
GUARANTEE
Most guarantee-related ads are connected with “money, “price” and “ship-ping/delivery.”
“Price guarantee,” the most popular guaran-tee-related phrase in the US and the UK, is aimed at securing the price of a product.
The second most popu-lar guarantee phrase in e-commerce ads is “mon-ey back guarantee” for both the US and UK.
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A call to action (CTA) creating urgency with a highly “clickable” button is one of the most powerful advertising tactics for immediately attracting customers to your website.
In our study, we examined what call to action buttons/banners are seen most frequently in the ads of the biggest e-commerce businesses. We also tried to identify what words and phrases can be considered “catchy” for the users that see your ads.
Calls to action that creates a sense of urgency
FREQUENCY
NOW FREE SHIPPING
SHOP NOW
BUY NOW
SHOP TODAY
ORDER NOW
BOOK NOW
ORDER TODAY
SAVE NOW
TODAY FREE
SHOP ONLINE NOW
US
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FREQUENCY
NOW FOR
SHOP NOW
ONLINE TODAY
ORDER NOW
BUY NOW
ONLINE NOW
SALE NOW
BOO KNOW
BOOK TODAY
SALE NOW ON
UK
The most popular keyword that indicates urgency is “now.” In UK e-commerce ads, “today” is also a favored CTA.
The most often leveraged CTA for both the US and UK is “shop now.”
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Appealing to emotions in your advertising campaign is one of the ways you can reach out to your customer. Think about how you can change the ads based on the knowl-edge of how the biggest e-commerces from the US and UK use them. Emotions that are displayed in the ads can affect the buying decisions.
Once you understand who your target audience is, you need to consider which emotional triggers you can attach to the message you send out.
To sum it up, this part of the study was based on the important aspects for e-com-merce businesses: what phrases they use, what guarantees they provide and what calls to action they employ. Taking into consideration this information in the pro-cess of creating the ads gives you an op-portunity to attract new customers while reducing cost-per-click (CPC) for an effec-tive, competitive advertising campaign.
What it means to you as marketer
When putting together the ads, you should keep in mind that it’s important to accomplish two goals:
Give the customer opportunity to understand that this add and this e-commerce is definitely what he/she was searching for.
Act on this feeling.
•
•
How SEMrush helps
Display Advertising
Advertising research
gather competitive intelligence on your top com-petitors to inform your own media plan. Pull a report of all the publishers where a competitor’s display ads were found to get a deeper analysis of your competitor’s target audience.
Examine the ads that are used by your competi-tors and create the best strategy for your e-com-merce business, having at your disposal all the information about keywords to use, estimated budgets and traffic to get with the targeted key-words.
Discover your ad campaign’s best options
Create winning advertising strategy
Create your PPC campaign
Ad builderBoost your PPC performance by collecting your competitors’ ideas. Create compelling ad texts, preview your ads and assign the newly created ads to existing keyword groups. Avoid the dupli-cate ads, and save both money and time!
Backlinks in numbers
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Backlinks in numbers
Creating the right backlink profile gives online businesses the opportu-nity to rank higher, as links from other relevant sites serve as a vote of credibility, trust, and authority to Google.
We analyzed what type of backlinks the biggest e-commerce business-es use, and the trend of the follow vs. nofollow attribute in backlinks to understand the online retailers approach to link building. Our analysis further breaks down the most popular and the most effective use of an-chor texts.
This part of the study was based on the information of more than 8,000 e-commerce websites from different countries.
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Top Anchors
Keeping users in mind, first, while thinking about your optimum profit margin is the best way to approach your link building strategy. The best anchor texts point directly to your product or category, which corre-sponds to the search user intent, in order to surface content relevant to the user’s interest.
Working on your link building strategy in a smart way, along with relevant partners and websites that align with your business or business goals can boost not only your rankings, but your e-commerce as well.
As part of our research, we explored the most popular anchors used by e-commerce websites, which is summarized here:
FREQUENCY
COMPARE PRICES
WRITE A REVIEW
VIEW
SHOP NOW
TERMS
SEE COVER
PRIVACY
BUY
SEE MORE DETAILS
SHOP
Among the less popular anchors is “compare pric-es,” used by approximately 14% of e-commerce websites.
The most popular anchor text is “write a review”.
“View” anchor is running second while “shop now” is third.
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Type of backlinks
Backlinks allow user to discover your website, your content and your products in different ways from other sources. And there are different types of backlinks.
It’s obvious that the majority of websites put the majority of their links like text element in content that can be presented as description of the product, in their blog post, or anywhere else.
The form, frame, and image works for some e-commerce industries as they want their clients to find the information in different, but still user friendly way. So, as a type of backlinks, we found images for only 7.96% of the analyzed ecommerces.
89.43%
TEXT
7.96%IMAGE
1.66%FORM0.96%FRAME
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89.76%
SPORTS & RECREATION CHILDREN FOOD & NEARFOOD ELECTRONICS
HEALTH HOME & GARDEN CLOTHING BOOKS
FURNITURE FLOWERS JEWELRY MUSIC
TRAVEL
FORMIMAGE FRAMETEXT
10.06% 0.16% 0.02% 75.82% 5.17% 10.84% 8.16% 95.95% 1.89% 2.12% 0.04% 87.56% 11.56% 0.17% 0.71%
90% 8.23% 0.09% 1.67% 95.37% 4.18% 0.32% 0.14% 92.32% 7.39% 0.03% 0.26% 76.26% 16.35% 7.34% 0.04%
99.61% 0.38% 0.01% 0% 83.57% 13.42% 3% 0.01% 96.3% 2.23% 0.56% 0.92% 92.87% 5.58% 0.74% 0.81%
89.64% 2.19% 0.21% 7.96%
The most popular type of backlinks is “text”, which accounts for 89.43% of all backlinks and is preva-lent in all of the industries comprised in the study.
The “image” type is the least represented in the children category, whereas “form” is least represented in electronics, clothing, health, jewelry, music and travel verticals.
The least popular type of backlink is the “frame”.
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Follow vs. Nofollow
There are always questions about follow/nofollow attributes in your backlinks profile and how it can influence your search visibility. In order to answer this question, it’s important to remember that follow backlinks pass “link juice” onto your website, it enhances the authority of your do-main, which brings you a higher ranking.
However, it's not possible to only have always follow links but, having no-follow backlinks from high authority websites is great because the more popular the resources are that lead to your website, the more traffic it can bring to you.
By creating awesome or original content, that is special for your users, you are able to get a lot of backlinks naturally and attract more people to your website. By putting your efforts into a smart link building and outreach strategy, you can get the backlinks you need for better rankings and visibility to your online business.
Our study shows that the backlink strategy of e-commerce websites is about “follow’ backlinks that we discovered in 79.5% of analyzed web-sites, while the “nofollow” backlinks in only in 20.5%.
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SPORT &RECREATION
FOOD &NEARFOOD HEALTH CLOTHING FURNITURE JEWELRY TRAVEL
MUSICFLOWERSBOOKSHOME &GARDEN
ELECTRONICSCHILDREN
87.88% 90.62% 92.42% 84.03% 83.04% 85.42% 70.30% 57.72% 98.66% 86.75% 86.90% 90.30% 38.70%
12.12% 9.38% 7.58% 15.97% 16.96% 14.58% 29.70% 42.28% 13.25% 13.10% 9.7% 61.29%
The travel industry is linked mostly with “no-follow” backlinks in their strategy, which represents 61.29%.
The e-commerces that represent the furniture category are linked with “follow” attribute backlinks more than any other indus-try with 98.66%.
The book industry is linked with “follow’ and “nofol-low” backlinks app. in the same percentages with 57.72% and 42.28%.
FOLLOW79.5%
NOFOLLOW20.5%
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The backlink strategy strongly influences higher rankings, whether you’re an e-com-merce or not. Constructing this strategy correctly, not only gives you the oppor-tunity to win the best positions, but also helps your user or client find the informa-tion easier and gives them the opportunity to find the information they’re interested in, and construct the best backlink profile, comparing your website with the competi-tors you have in your niche.
Using the data from our study, e-com-merces have the ability to understand what is happening in their niche, how they can change their strategy, and what they
What it means to you as marketer
How SEMrush helps
Backlinks
Link Building tool
helps you to conduct a deep link analysis of all referring domains’ authority, gain competitive link intelligence on your rivals’ backlinks, spot new referral traffic sources, and improve your link building strategy with the insights gained. Discover both the referring links and your site's target webpages.
collects a list of link building opportunities for your website and helps you to run an outreach campaign in order to contact website owners, ac-quire the best backlinks for your website backlink profile, and rank higher.
Check your backlinks
Find the best link building opportunities
Backlink Auditprovides an in-depth look at your domain’s back-links and helps with securing your SEO link build-ing efforts from Google penalties. Analyze the links that are putting your site at risk, determine how backlinks affect your website using the tox-ic markers, and monitor new backlinks for your e-commerce.
Help your website with Backlink Audit
can do to have better positions. These types of backlinks can help to understand how you can organize your pages, where the anchors of the biggest e-commerces can be implemented in your profile, and the nofollow/follow attribute that can give you an idea of the 21st century SEO plans of even the biggest online shops.
Looking what your competitors are doing always gives you a better understanding of not only which types of links to use, but which websites/resources you can receive those backlinks from, and which trusted resources can be useful for you.
Technicalissues
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Technical issues
Launching e-commerce is just the first step on your way to being the best one. All sites need to know which technical issues can negatively affect their website rankings. There are plenty of issues that websites have, which we analyzed in our latest study.
In this analysis, we want to focus on two imperative things for any type of ecommerce sites: the HTTP/HTTPS and the use of hreflangs.
The first one is a must have for e-commerces, as the clients need to be sure that they are using the secure version of the website, which is im-portant for payment processes. Having that in mind, the study is based on the analysis of the e-commerce website from different countries, as it was more logical to look at international e-commerce in terms of using hreflangs, which is working on different languages, as the usage of hre-flangs can help you take the “wheel while you are driving”.
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HTTP / HTTPS
By using HTTPS, you provide your user with security, credibility, and the best user experience. Both the user and Google has to trust your if you want people to make purchases on your website, especially because Google now prefers HTTPS websites.
If we look at different statistics, like our own ranking factors study (and others), we can find that most websites with HTTPS are on the first page (app 60-65%)
HTTPS
HTTP
60.19%
39.81%
ALL SITES
HTTP
HTTPS
23.08%
76.92%
TOP 50
60.19% of all analyzed websites are using the HTTPS version of the website, while there is still 39.81% of those who are still using the HTTP versions.
In order to get a better understanding of the situation, SEMrush looked through the top 50 websites (according SEMrush traffic data) and found that there are 76.92% of them who are using the HTTPS version.
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Hreflangs
Using hreflang attribute is an easy way to offer more relevant content to your users in different countries’ in the Google search. Hreflang imple-mentation with indicating language or language/country of targeted au-dience, allows you to show different content in your ecommerce website pages with modifications like design, translated text, local currencies, or special offers which are more oriented to users in specific country.
TOP5045.65%
ALL SITES20.3%
Only 20.3% of all analyzed e-commerce have hreflangs implemented in their websites.
Looking at the top 50 websites, that are mostly international, we found that there are 45.65% of usage of hreflangs.
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If you are a marketer, there is always the question how to make your website rank higher, and technical issues is one of the milestones for this process.
Aside from providing critical security and data integrity for both your websites and your users' personal information, this makes the user really happy. There are a lot of things you need to know about HTTPS implementation or migration from HTTP to HTTPS, such as: a valid certifi-cate, server configurations, and website architecture. These points need to be un-der control in order to provide your users with best user experience and so that you
What it means to you as marketer
How SEMrush helps
Site Audithelps you to understand your current situation of your site’s HTTPS implementation, check for any problematic issues, and analyze international SEO efforts using the hreflang tag.
Start analyzing your website
Sensoroffers a number of ways to dive deeper into more specific types of search results, including mon-itoring the presence of HTTPS versions of web-sites in the top SERP results, not only in general, but within specific categories that are relevant to your ecommerce business.
Check your industry HTTPS usage
don’t lose your positions in Google. Check our study on HTTPS implementation is-sues.
If you want to prevent search bots from getting confused in your website language versions, you need the hreflang attribute. Hreflang helps search engines to deter-mine which language the current page is written in, and whether there is an alter-native version in another language. If you have an international e-commerce site, there are a lot of advantages to using and implementing it in your website. Discover how to avoid hreflang implementation is-sues with this study.
semrush.com
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